Daily Archives: January 24, 2014

This week’s task has been to take a couple of minutes from the recordings of THATCAMPAccess, and create a visual layout of the conversation using a workbook in Excel. This task is tedious, however it is critical to reacquaint myself with the exciting conversations that took place in October of last year at Carleton University during THATCAMPAccess.

The first conversation that I took in was ‘The Role Played By Libraries In the Digital Humanities’. Hearing this discussion again has reminded me of why I have chosen the path I have. What I mean by this of course is that for me, the Digital Humanities have played a huge roll in making libraries, and therefore history more accessible. For years I would stay as far away from libraries as possible in order to avoid having to go through the exhausting process of taking a very heavy book off the shelf and sift through endless pages to find what I need.

Nowadays, however, the library is filled with different technologies that are designed to help solve those problems. The conversation that took place at THATCAMPAccess revolved around this very topic. Libraries are so important, as Dr Graham explained during the conversation, as the study of Digital Humanities is twofold. First, the study of how technology affects society, and second utilizing said technology for research (for example recreating historic situations and letting them play out virtually). The library, as was discussed in this conversation, is the bridge between these two gaps. One participant demonstrated how at this moment, there is a great deal of funding for projects like these with libraries as many individuals are receiving grants to create digital archives and databases for libraries around the world.

All of this information was taken in during the first ten minutes of discussion. It is hard to imagine just how much else I will be reminded of as I take on the project of re-listening to this whole ‘unconference’.